“Last night, I stayed up until 6 o’clock figuring out how to do this,” says Riley “Caezar” Eller, a slender and bookish 27-year-old. Scribbling furiously on a dry-erase board covered with boxy diagrams representing a pair of networked computers, Eller maps out a novel cyberattack-a method of disabling a supposedly impregnable system with a few clever lines of code. His listeners nod each step of the way, occasionally grunting their approval. When the presentation is over and the imaginary defenses have all been surmounted, they break into polite applause.

Such demonstrations are part of the standard curriculum at the major security consultancies. But Eller isn’t giving this lecture in a sterile conference room at PricewaterhouseCoopers or Deloitte & Touche.
The setting is a subterranean hideout that closely resembles a frat house, complete with lava lamps and a rickety bar that reeks of week-old spilled Smirnoff. His cohorts – sworn enemies of office cubicles and Brooks Brothers suits – are members of an invite-only group of ace programmers, cryptography enthusiasts, and hardware wizards. Their think tank-cum-social club is known as the Ghetto Hackers.(more…)

Many Americans who troll the internet in search of health-related information are bored or simply frustrated with “just the facts”: They want the Web to help manage their health and that of their loved ones. A new generation of “care sites” addresses those demands. These Websites offer sophisticated monitoring devices, tailored treatment plans, personalized webpages that store individuals’ health-care data, and regular interaction with health-care professionals who monitor and/or manage their health.

It’s a fact that your ads will be shown to a much wider audience when your keywords are set to broad match. But, without a large AdWords negative keywords list, you’ll probably be very disappointed with your results. Given this fact, you’ll want to know how to create a meaningful negative keyword list for all your broad match keywords.

If you’re like most, you’ll use a keyword tool like Google’s to find targeted keyword phrases for your AdWords campaigns. Most people will look at the list their particular tool produces, pull out the relevant keywords for their campaign and then discard the rest.
The right thing to do with those discarded keywords is to use them to create your negative keywords list.
Although at first, this might seem strange, the fact is that your keyword tool has discovered these non-targeted keywords when researching your niche. Google obviously thinks they may be relevant and it’s up to you to tell AdWords that they are not. (more…)

1) It produces joy in your life. It feels good to give to someone or a cause that is truly in need. When you are a blessing to someone else, it produces a type of happiness in you that won’t come from anywhere or anything else.
2) Giving helps you live within your means. If you are giving 5 or 10 percent of your income, it helps you to avoid stretching your own finances to the limit. It forces you to be more precise, focused and planned with the remaining 95 or 90 percent. With less margin for error, you will be less sloppy.

3) It sets an example for your children. When your children see you give, especially giving cheerfully, it will teach them to be generous as well. When you discuss various opportunities for giving with them, it will teach them to be thoughtful and responsible as they decide who or what to support. We all know that our kids will mimic our behavior. Encouraging them to give with their own money now will setup a great habit for the future.(more…)

Face it: There is no such thing as an “Internet-only” customer. No matter how great your Website is, customers will reach you by phone, fax, email – and, if you have a physical presence, in person. It’s increasingly (and fortunately) rare to find a Website that does not let customers phone and email for questions, issues, and support. (Even Amazon.com answers its phone for customer service.)

True, these are the same customers who also use the Web to research, order, check on orders, and get support. But in displaying all that cross-channel behavior, customers are giving you important clues about how they want you to reach out to them.
So how do you map out a sharp advertising and marketing strategy for luring new customers? Mix and match your outreach media. Remember, you’re not going after the Web customer, you’re recruiting a multichannel customer. As Judy Neuman, divisional vice president for Eddie Bauer’s I-Media Group explains: “I want my customer to shop in the store in the mall on Saturday, receive a catalog on Thursday, and shop on the Web Friday night, after the kids are in bed.”(more…)

WHAT IS THE WWSGD PLUGIN?

I know when I first started out blogging, the “What Would Seth Godin Do” Plugin or WWSGD Plugin was a must-have on everyone’s list of top 10 plugins. I have been using it now for the past 3 months, or since I started blogging, but have since found one that I think totally outdoes WWSGD!

This is so much more intuitive, highly customizable and just looks clean and stands out at the same time without being obtrusive. What plugin am I talking about… The WP Greet BoxPlugin.

WHAT IS THE WP GREET BOX PLUGIN?

The WP Greet Box is a highly intuitive plugin that provides a “greeting” or “welcome message” based on where the traffic has been driven from to your site. Much like the WWSGD plugin, you can customize the message that you display in your welcome message, however, this plugin also allows you to “re-share” or “re-syndicate” based on, again, the traffic source or site referrer.
Check out my quick video below which shares with you just how awesome this plugin is and why I have decided to go with this one and ditch WWSGD. Enjoy!(more…)

E-commerce sites everywhere know how tough it is to persuade individuals to complete the final steps of the purchasing process. Abandoned shopping carts, consumers’ distrust of merchandise they can’t touch, and other issues get in the way of selling goods online.
Well, ICE.com, an online jewelry retailer, recently took a new approach to guiding customers toward a purchase. And in doing so, the company saw conversions increase more than 500 percent.

Purchasing made easy
ICE.com has been conducting email marketing campaigns for some time now. It has built up a database of more than 700,000 names, largely through sweepstakes campaigns, and the company sends out thousands of email messages to its database each month.
But back in February, it tried something new. Working with Cybuy, a company that offers digital marketing products, and CheetahMail, an email marketing company, ICE.com created a special commerce-enabled email message.
The HTML message featured two products: sapphire-and-diamond earrings in white gold and a charm bracelet in sterling silver. Recipients were presented with incentives such as a discount and free shipping; the message also included links back to the ICE.com Website and explained how to unsubscribe from the database.(more…)

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. Not so illuminating as you had hoped? Well, let’s take a look if we break the definition down to the important elements:
“Style sheets have actually been around longer than the internet.”
So this is about Style Sheet – CSS. This is useful as a starting point, since we have known style sheets already at the time when the web still had to be created.
Back in the old and golden days of the world of business, style sheets were quite literally sheets (or more often, documents) that were describing, in excruciating detail, how all documents created by, a or used for, a specific company should look. (more…)

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to grow your business. It’s highly targeted, highly trackable and it’s cheap! How else can you deliver a custom marketing message directly to the inbox of a highly targeted subscriber? Nowhere!

So enough about the WHY, now let’s talk about the HOW. To start, you need a list of people to email, right? Growing your email list can be as challenging as marketing to them, it’s certainly as important. Here are a couple of easy tips for increasing your email subscribers.Tip #1 – Say SomethingOffer some content, an article, a report or even a video. Choose a subject that you’re an expert in, something that you’re passionate about, something that people are going to want to read. Invite your website visitors to sign-up for your email newsletter in exchange for the content.

So you’ve started your brand new blog huh?
The excitement may not last long. After a few weeks or months, perhaps you’ve begun to experience burnout. Perhaps you like the feeling to be able to post your opinion on the Web, but writing becomes a chore rather than something fun to do on a regular basis.

Readership may not grow at the rate that you think the blog is worth the effort. Sounds familiar? I guess it is to many of us. It happens to some of my blogs too, in many times.
As with any other venture, it takes effort to succeed. While a blog turns web publishing into a very easy and convenient task, actually writing great content and building readerships — and later relationships — are the real challenges.
Below are my own 7 strategies to find, build and grow our blog readership:

1. CONTENT IS KING

Content will always be king. People get turned off by a site or blog with excessive ads without solid substance. If you have been blogging for some time, chances are you have several “best” or “popular” articles that you are proud of.(more…)